{"id":18472,"date":"2018-06-14T20:19:38","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T12:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/tech-titan-nathan-myhrvold-revisits-nasa-asteroid-argument-in-peer-reviewed-paper\/"},"modified":"2018-06-14T20:19:38","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T12:19:38","slug":"tech-titan-nathan-myhrvold-revisits-nasa-asteroid-argument-in-peer-reviewed-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/tech-titan-nathan-myhrvold-revisits-nasa-asteroid-argument-in-peer-reviewed-paper\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech titan Nathan Myhrvold revisits NASA asteroid argument in peer-reviewed paper"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_251212\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-251212\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-251212\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/160523-myhrvold2-630x472.jpg\" alt=\"Nathan Myhrvold\" width=\"630\" height=\"472\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/160523-myhrvold2-630x472.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/160523-myhrvold2-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/160523-myhrvold2-1240x930.jpg 1240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-251212\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash., Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which was left behind by an asteroid impact in 2013. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Nathan Myhrvold is back, and this time he\u2019s got peer review on his side.<\/p>\n<p>Two years ago, the Seattle tech pioneer tangled with NASA and the scientists behind an infrared sky survey mission known as NEOWISE, over a data set that cataloged the characteristics of more than 157,000 asteroids.<\/p>\n<p>In a lengthy assessment, Myhrvold said the NEOWISE team had made flawed and misleading correlations between the brightness and the size of asteroids.<\/p>\n<p>In response, NASA pointed to mistakes in Myhrvold\u2019s critique and noted that his claims hadn\u2019t gone through scientific peer review.&nbsp;\u201cIt is important that any paper undergo peer review by an independent journal before it can be seriously considered,\u201d NASA said at the time.<\/p>\n<p>If that\u2019s so, then it\u2019s time for serious consideration. Myhrvold\u2019s paper, \u201cAn Empirical Examination of WISE\/NEOWISE Asteroid Analysis and Results,\u201d has now been published (with corrections of what he acknowledged were mistakes) in the peer-reviewed journal Icarus.<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s not all: Today Myhrvold posted a detailed rundown on the Medium website, listing what\u2019s wrong with the NEOWISE data in relatively lay terms. He also contributed a post to Retraction Watch that focused on his efforts to use the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, to get to the bottom of the controversy.<\/p>\n<p>In 25 words or less: Myhrvold insists that the NEOWISE team hadn\u2019t been sufficiently forthcoming with the data to back up its assessment of asteroid size distribution, and fed in data from other sources to make that assessment look more precise than it actually was. (OK, that was 40 words, but I tried.)<\/p>\n<p>NASA continues to stand by the data and findings from the NEOWISE team, and the documents that Myhrvold has been getting through the FOIA process suggest that the exchange has gotten increasingly bogged down in lawyerly wrangling.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Nathan Myhrvold at the 2016 GeekWire Summit\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Om01V3C8Zyo?start=2213&amp;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Why pursue this dispute so doggedly? \u201cBad judgment?\u201d Myhrvold joked today during a telephone interview with GeekWire.<\/p>\n<p>Myhrvold&nbsp;served as Microsoft\u2019s first chief technology officer, and thanks to his success in that position, he\u2019s now able to take on a wide range of challenges. He\u2019s the CEO of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash.; the author of a series of books that take a scientific approach to cuisine; and a dinosaur researcher who\u2019s gotten into squabbles with paleontologists in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Like the dinosaur debate, Myhrvold\u2019s adversarial attitude is motivated in part by a feeling that he has to right what he sees as an unacknowledged wrong in someone\u2019s scientific analysis. \u201cOnce I got started on it, there are a variety of things that could have had me quit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>But as long as he was facing resistance, he felt that he was in the position of either giving up or pressing on. \u201cTo me, that wasn\u2019t much of a choice,\u201d Myhrvold said.<\/p>\n<p>Now Myhrvold is getting ready to press on with the next step in his own asteroid assessment, in league with UCLA planetary scientist Jean-Luc Margot as well as researchers at the University of Washington.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we\u2019re hoping to do is reanalyze the NEOWISE data, and do so in an open and transparent way,\u201d Myhrvold said. \u201cOur goal overall is to take the code and the data, and post the results so that anybody can use it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s also hoping to come up with surprises that may have been missed in the initial data analysis. \u201cAsteroids are very diverse objects \u2014 and in general, when you examine bodies you\u2019ve never looked at before in a new way, you find stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"NASA's NEOWISE: Four Years of Asteroid and Comet Data\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1zpXL6fYafE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>There could well be more good stuff ahead: The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, is expected to provide a wealth of data about asteroids when it comes online in the early 2020s.<\/p>\n<p>NASA is also considering whether to go ahead with a space telescope known as NEOCam to follow up on NEOWISE\u2019s asteroid search. Myhrvold, however, argues that LSST will be capable of doing most of what NEOCam would do. \u201cNEOCam was designed many years ago for finding asteroids, not really for measuring their properties,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Myhrvold said \u201cwhat the world really needs\u201d is a different type of space telescope that can supplement the LSST\u2019s observations. And that\u2019s likely to be the starting point for the next asteroid argument.<\/p>\n<p>The argument isn\u2019t merely academic: Getting the right sort of information about asteroids could help scientists gain a better understanding about the origins of the solar system, the availability of space resources, and the prospects for identifying and diverting potentially harmful space rocks.<\/p>\n<p>Myhrvold pointed to the Tunguska event, a massive explosion that destroyed half a million acres of forest land in Siberia in 1908 and was thought to have been caused by an incoming asteroid or comet.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf that had happened in a populated part of Earth \u2026 the whole 20th century would have been scarred by this,\u201d Myhrvold said. \u201cWe basically had our wakeup call on asteroids, and we didn\u2019t hear it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash., Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which was left behind by an asteroid impact in 2013. (GeekWire Photo \/ Alan Boyle) Nathan Myhrvold is back, and this time he\u2019s got peer review on his side. Two years ago, the Seattle tech pioneer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1519,190,5218,1325],"class_list":["post-18472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-asteroids","tag-nasa","tag-nathan-myhrvold","tag-neowise"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18472"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}